Datacenters house collections of servers and networking hardware, including switches and routers. Often many different cabled connections between components are used to connect the components, for example, to permit data transfer between the components. The number of connections for any given component can quickly become nontrivial as one component may connect to tens or hundreds of other components through such cabled connections. If any of these many connections are inadequate (e.g., if a cable or connector is fouled by dust or otherwise damaged), functionality of components within a server cluster may be negatively impacted, for example, causing reduction in network capacity, speed, or reliability, or, in some cases, even preventing the components from functioning as a network at all.
In many situations, installers may prepare to connect components by laying out a large number of cables that are then individually installed into appropriate sockets in the components. Significant amounts of dust, debris, or other foreign particulate may be kicked up as installers move about the laid out cables. Such foreign particulate may foul or otherwise cause damage to the cables or couplers used to connect cables to respective components. For example, for optic cables, foreign particulate can cause damage to the surface of the optic cable including scratching, pitting, obscuring, etc. Damage points may result in loss of signal quality and ultimately, underperforming or error prone connections.
Accordingly, many cables feature removable caps mounted on cable connectors to reduce exposure to dust or other foreign particulate during transport and/or installation of the cables. In practice, such caps can be removed to expose fiber optic ferrules or other sensitive couplers, for example, just before installation into respective components. However, such caps may be prematurely removed or lost and thus in many cases fail to block exposure to dust or other foreign particulate that may negatively affect cables, couplers, and/or networks.